Our overnight bus from Hervey Bay to Brisbane got in almost a full hour early (at 6am instead of 7am) which was unfortunate since that meant we had less than 5 hours to sleep, and had an hour to kill before the car rental place opened. We eventually got our car from Hertz and drove an hour south to Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast. We checked into our hostel and had a bit of a nap while we were waiting for Adam Tait to arrive. Adam is a friend of Craig's from university who moved from Ottawa to Sydney in August, so Craig hadn't had much opportunity to see him since university.
Once Adam arrived, we had some Australian pies for lunch and booked a 2 hour long afternoon surfing lesson with Go Catch a Wave. Although Adam and Craig had both tried surfing at least once before, this was my first time so I was really looking forward to the lesson. The lesson was really great - we were given rash guards (long sleeved shirts to wear while surfing) and big foam G-boards (which are more stable because they are big and hurt less when they hit you because they're foam) and were taken to the beach where we were taught about how waves are formed, where you want to be to catch a wave, how to position yourself on your board and how to catch a wave. We spent the next hour pretty much boogie boarding - we caught waves but only lifted our shoulders to ride them, instead of standing. This was a lot of fun and helped get us comfortable catching the waves and gave us a lot of practice on timing. After an hour we went back to the beach and learnt two techniques for standing up, and how to stand on the board. After practicing a bit on land we took to the water for another hour. We had great fun and the three of us were all able to successfully stand on our boards at least a few times. The surfing was a lot of work because the waves were really strong and some were quite large, so walking the board out to catch a wave was much more effort than catching and riding the wave. Luckily though the beach was a very slow descent so we were able to walk out quite far and still touch the ground. We never went out past the break of the wave and didn't need to go deeper than we could walk to get a good wave. There were a few waves that hit me with a lot of gusto, sending me sprawling back to shore - I quickly learnt to take a breath before getting hit by the larger waves in case I got pulled underwater for a few seconds. By the end of the lesson, my whole body was a bit sore from struggling against the water when going out, and from doing pushups to get standing on the board. Great experience though and looking forward to trying it again!
After the lesson we went to a nice Thai restaurant for a lovely dinner with some really nice tofu dishes. Yum!
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